Scrap the Mayoral limo. Reduce Mayor’s salary by 30%. Cap all RMBC employees expenses at £1000. Publish quarterly figures for the amounts of Council Tax arrears uncollected-and why. Stop all car expenses claims for journey’s less than 10 miles from home or base. Stop all free newspapers, magazines, periodicals and non-council business telephone calls for all council employees.
Put and end to being paid twice from the public purse..
Councillor to Rotherham MBC, Shabana Ahmed, is also a manager in Children’s Services at Sheffield CC. Another councillor at Rotherham, Brian Steele, a member of the Cabinet, is a full-time employee of Barnsley MBC as a union representative.
Under local government guidelines, both these two people are allowed a minimum of 208 hours a year (28 days) paid leave to attend to council business in their positions as elected members of a local authority. They are also paid an allowance to be members of a local authority. In Rotherham’s case they qualify for a basic annual allowance of £12,130. That, less tax and National Insurance, is what Cllr Ahmed received between May 2012, when she was elected, and April 2013.
But for 5.6 weeks (28 days) of that municipal year she will be undertaking Rotherham MBC duties (for which she receives her councillors’ allowance) and being paid by Sheffield CC. Remember, only a few meetings will go on all day and relatively few involve all councillors. Given that there is no council business done in August and that business stops on December 10 and doesn’t begin again until January 7, you don’t need to be a financial wizard to work out how generous the public purse is being to Cllr Ahmed.
And it’s generous to Cllr Brian Steele. He’s a full-time union representative at Barnsley MBC, but also a councillor at Rotherham MBC. I don’t know what he is paid by Barnsley, but I do know that as a councillor with Rotherham he, like Cllr Ahmed, receives his basic allowance. According to official figures supplied by Rotherham MBC, between 20 May 2011 and 18 May 2012 he attended meetings on 44 days. For 28 of those days he should have been receiving his full salary from Barnsley MBC, leaving him to finance the remaining 16 days with the £12,130 he received from Rotherham.
I use Cllr Ahmed and Cllr Steele only as examples. I’m not picking on them. Remember, they didn’t make the rules.

Scrap Cllr expenses full stop. (I won’t be taking a single penny of expenses if elected next May, it’s one of my pledges)
I am keen to focus on financial savings. Any cars on the books of RMBC ought to be scrapped, as well as an urgent review of Mr Kimber’s eye-watering salary.
We have to practice what we preach in times of austerity.

It smacks of desperation – These officers are paid big money to make these decisions aren’t they? So maybe we should replace them all with a council of ordinary intelligent and independent citizens elected by the people to represent their views and implement sensible policies – hey, wait a minute! That’s what we should have already!! So why isn’t it working then?

And there was me thinking that it was some of the staff of the council putting in their evenings and weekends to work on the forum – so that decision-making might be more influenced by the “ordinary intelligent and independent citizens ” of Rotherham.
Whilst it may be happening under Karl Battersby’s brief, It is hardly a “Karl Speaks” thing.
Have you tried visiting the forum? It needs people like you Rev, people with ideas.

Rev,
Great! Constructive ideas/criticism of the system is what is needed. The RMBC guys modding it are still on a learning curve, but they are working hard.
…. and you can say:
“their expenses should be cut because they are higher than Sheffs, etc , etc.”
But as with most things, it is far more complicated than that. 🙂